How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defense team

https://news.careers360.com/sci-hub-scihub-libgen-alexandra-elbakyan-lawsuit-india-delhi-high-court-du-sol-delhi-university-iiser-jnu-mit-iit-science-research-elsevier

by sixtyfourbits • 5 years ago

264 61 5 years ago

news.careers360.com

anthropodie• 5 years ago

Suppose SciHub looses cases in multiple countries and has to shutdown. What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent?

Piracy is result of unfair prices. Music used to be pirated all the time but then Spotify came along with subscription based services. I don't know anyone who still pirates music. Maybe people with IP and copyright claims should learn from Music industry.

jhgb2• 5 years ago

What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent?

What do you mean by that? It's already a bunch of torrents on the official SciHub page.

pradn• 5 years ago

Yes, these torrents hold hundreds or thousands of articles each. You can help preserve them by downloading and seeding them.

xrisk• 5 years ago

Can you point me to these torrents please? I can’t seem to find them.

yashwastaken• 5 years ago

But pirating music is different from streaming it on some application. Like you don't own the music file you're just streaming it from some servers(in case of downloading you still need the app and can't share it to some other device).

martin_a• 5 years ago

I don't think that matters.

Everybody had a bunch (or thousands) of MP3s because mobile phones weren't a thing, fast mobile connections weren't a thing and there was simply no infrastructure to have something like Spotify.

If we'd have Spotify with everything in 2003, we would not swap hard drives in school breaks.

adamc2• 5 years ago

I am not convinced music prices were "unfair" -- they were higher than people wanted to pay. There is a distinction.

danuker2• 5 years ago

What is a fair price? There is no such thing.

An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total profit.

If it's too high, fewer people will buy the product, which might reduce profit. If it's too low, the profit margin will be small in spite of lots of units sold.

scns• 5 years ago

Hm, unfair to whom. Do you know how much the artists actually receive?

There are clauses from the days of shipping vinyl to record stores, regarding breakage of disks. The label keeps a percentage (5% - 10% can't remember correctly), for broken disks. They still use these clauses decades after they have <edit>lost</edit> any basis in reality.

The Police financed the recordings themselves, to get higher royalty percentages.

Have you read about majors suing artists for damages after their albums flopped?

How much do the people earn that made the music in the first place? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keati...

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/12/06/zoe-keating-spot...

Further reading here, published 21 years ago: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

caslon• 5 years ago

Shutting down isn't actually on the table here. In the best case, she wins. In the worst case, she goes back to her post-USSR nation that doesn't really care about international copyright law and continues to ignore international copyright law.

creamynebula• 5 years ago

Pirating music remains lively on the private tracker scene

xtracto• 5 years ago

MP3 art shared by napster is different from Knowledge shared by SciHub in that the former was financed privately by record companies while the latter is funded by state taxes (i.e. public money).

At the current state of affairs, Scientific Publishers can be reduced as "curators" of public research publications. They may work very well at that (i.e. reading something from Nature, or from JAMA has its prestige) but there is no reason why they should gate the knowledge behind paywalls. They should offer their "curation/selection" services, dedicated to create lists/collections of scientific articles already published elsewhere for free.

justinator2• 5 years ago

s/defence/defense/

cogman10• 5 years ago

The correct spelling of defen(c|s)e is regional (as are many English words).

belltaco2• 5 years ago

Not really. https://proofreadmyessay.co.uk/writing-tips/spelling-tips-de...

India uses British English.

BoxOfRain2• 5 years ago

Not all English is American English, in countries influenced by British English defence is often the correct spelling.

justinator2• 5 years ago

Thank you, I've been corrected.

Izikiel43• 5 years ago

Also, center in british english is centre.

rramadass• 5 years ago

“The way the publishing industry is functioning is unethical. Though what Alexandra Elbakyan is doing is illegal she is countering an industry that is working unethically,”

100% agree with this; Though i would dispute that what she is doing is "illegal". When the deck is completely stacked against you, going outside the rules is not "illegal".

Every rational, educated person on this planet should support free access to Knowledge if we are to achieve a fairer, egalitarian society.

More power to Sci-Hub, LibGen and their brethren !

judge2020• 5 years ago

When the deck is completely stacked against you, going outside the rules is not "illegal".

Yes it is. Things are "illegal" when they're in the law book, regardless of which law they're breaking and what they're standing up for.

frenchy• 5 years ago

In most places, and certainly in places that practice "common law" and democracy, part of what makes something legal is its moral acceptability. The laws on the books exist to reflect that and to make things function efficiently and fairly. Without that, laws are simply a tool of violence and oppression by the authorities (or the majority, in case of a democracy) against their population.

That's why we have juries of peers, and the ability of a jury to say "this person did the thing, but they shouldn't be punished for it".

yardie• 5 years ago

In quite a few US states anti-miscegenation laws are still on the books. You would hardly find a lawyer or judge to take the case but most haven't been removed, yet. If you told a interracial couple that what they are doing is "illegal" you'd rightly be laughed at.

autoliteInline• 5 years ago

Things are "illegal" when they're in the law book,

Probably oughtta get the Kazakhstani Disney police right on it.

_bqot• 5 years ago

Isn't this double negation? If what the industry is doing is unethical and what Alexandra is doing is considered "illegal" in the eyes of that industry... wouldn't that make it actually legal and ethical?

SuoDuanDao• 5 years ago

I think it's quite important to distinguish between 'legal' and 'ethical'. What Alexandra is doing is illegal and ethical. If we don't view those two as separate it becomes way too easy to excuse unethical behaviour on the basis of 'just obeying the law'

wizardofmysore• 5 years ago

I think the author meant that from a constitutional POV. There are no provisions for free access even if its not affordable.

godelmachine• 5 years ago

I wish there was a way I could financially support Sci-Hub.

The only impediment is they accept cryptocurrency and I am too lazy to get well versed with it. Not forgetting to mention the prices are currently through the roof, and TBH unaffordable for me.

But just like I regularly support Wikipedia and USENIX with modest but periodic donations, I would like to support Sci-Hub as well.

commoner• 5 years ago

Not forgetting to mention the prices are currently through the roof, and TBH unaffordable for me.

Cryptocurrencies are divisible into tiny fractional units, so you don't have to buy a whole unit of a cryptocurrency to use it. While it is a small hassle to convert your currency to cryptocurrency before sending it, if you use an exchange like Coinbase, it's not much harder than transferring money to a different bank/investment account.

maccard• 5 years ago

it's not much harder than transferring money to a different bank/investment account.

Yes, along with all the KYC requirements that coinbase require, just like my investment account does. Meanwhile the bar for services like Pateron, paypal, shopify, etc is one click and done.

2Gkashmiri2• 5 years ago

why? what is the "benefit of elsevier"? beyond holding copyright to the work of others which they give away for free, what value addition does elsevier bring to the table that cant be done otherwise? if the argument is that they provide classification and other stuff, why cant you just dump everything on schihub and let people do the organization themselves?

remember a few hundred years ago, horse drawn carts were a big business but cars drew them to extinction. should we bring back horse drawn carts monopoly of the old just because they were something once?

on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on scihub directly?

ausbin• 5 years ago

on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on scihub directly?

Many compsci/physics/math researchers already submit preprints (or post-prints even) of their papers to arXiv, which is public: https://arxiv.org/. I'm confused, is there a reason why they should they submit to Sci-Hub too?

Y_Y2• 5 years ago

They're not always quite the same, often arxiv have doesn't updates reflecting changes during the publication process (not including formatting). Can be annoying, the can be subtle differences and people aren't really careful about which versions they use or cite.

pkaye2• 5 years ago

on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on scihub directly?

Because Elsevier own prestigious journals that authors want to publish on. Its like saying why compete in the Olympics when you can compete in your local races.

2Gkashmiri2• 5 years ago

why dont they dual publish or does publishing on elsevier make you forfeit the right to publish elsewhere ? publish on elsevier and simultaneously publish on scihub also? what is the problem in that?

cheeko1234• 5 years ago

Multi-billion dollar international team of lawyers vs a bunch of young volunteers!

I’m rooting for the little guys...

kbad10002• 5 years ago

Haha, PepsiCo (Lays owner) lost case against farmers who produced the special potatoes in India.

How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defense team

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